Calvin Allen is Vice President for Partnerships and Programs for MDC’s programmatic vision and direction while supervising MDC’s program leaders. He also cultivates and manages key state, regional, and national partnerships across the 13 southern states MDC supports. With 30 years of nonprofit experience in organizational development, philanthropy, rural community economic development, conflict management, and leadership development, Calvin holds a bachelor’s degree and a certificate in nonprofit management from Duke University, where he has also been a co-instructor at the Nicholas School of the Environment for the past 10 years for their Community Based Environmental Management practicum.

Calvin joined MDC in 2021 as Senior Program Director for the Rural Forward program. He co-founded Rural Forward in 2014 after serving three years with the Golden LEAF Foundation as a community grantmaking program officer. He also served as deputy director at the Southern Rural Development Initiative, director of the National Community Forestry Service Center at the Conservation Fund, and associate director at the Dispute Settlement Center of Orange County. He is a 1994 graduate of Leadership Durham and a 2003-2005 graduate of the William C. Friday Fellow for Human Relations through the Wildacres Leadership Initiative where he serves on the board of directors.

Melanie Barron is an organizer with the Communications Workers of America. She has been organizing with CWA for 13 years, first as a member of United Campus Workers (UCW), CWA Local 3865, a direct-join, wall-to-wall union for public higher education workers in Tennessee. She joined UCW as a member in 2012 while working at the University of Tennessee and served in a variety of member roles before joining the local staff in 2015. During her first few years as a local organizer, she was part of the team to defeat a major outsourcing push in Tennessee state government through a campaign called Tennessee is Not for Sale. This raised the profile of UCW, and in 2018, she joined CWA staff to expand the UCW model of organizing beyond Tennessee to universities across the South. Now, UCW is a mega-local with 5,000 members spanning 8 states and dozens of campuses, and there are additional UCW locals in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. 

 

Currently, Melanie is organizing with United Videogame Workers, a new industry-wide, direct-join union for videogame developers, and she’s supporting a variety of CWA organizing priorities in the Southeast region. She believes in the labor movement’s potential to reinvigorate civic life in the United States, and wants to support new forms of labor organization to aggressively organize as many workers as possible into our movement, regardless of the legal barriers they may face to certification and collective bargaining.

Kelsey Coleman is a Regional Organizer for the Southern Labor Youth Movement (SLYM), a student organization preparing young people to build political power in the South via organizing campaigns and political education. Inspired by the Black and worker power movements of the South, Kelsey helped found SLYM in February 2025 because she understood the urgent need to challenge the power of the wealthy interests that have dominated the South for so long, including the biggest employers and universities. Kelsey joined the labor movement in 2021 as a student worker at the University of Maryland College Park, fighting for a $15 minimum wage on campus with AFSCME Local 1072. She’s a DMV native and is currently based in Durham, NC. 

Ajamu Dillahunt-Holloway is an Assistant Professor of African American History and Public History at NC State University. His research is on twentieth century African American history with a focus on the U.S. South, labor, environmental justice, and the Black Freedom Struggle. Dillahunt-Holloway’s research and commitment to making the world a better place has allowed him to travel to South Africa, Cuba, Palestine, and Senegal. 

At present, he is a board member of the Interreligious Foundation of Community Organizations (IFCO), the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (NCEJN), and Democracy North Carolina. Dillahunt-Holloway is also part of the City of Raleigh’s Historic Resources and Museums Advisory Board, and the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee. At present, Dillahunt-Holloway is at work on a book tentatively titled The South Will Never Be the Same: The History of Black Workers for Justice, Black Liberation, and Southern Labor. Dillahunt-Holloway earned his Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University in 2023. He holds a B.A. in History and a B.A. in Political Science from North Carolina Central University.